The Faculty of Science, the Mathematical Institute and the Institute of Biology are looking for a PhD Student in Theoretical or Mathematical Biology.
The opening is for a research position within the field of mathematical or theoretical biology, computational physics, applied mathematics or computational science. This PhD project is part of the Gravitation programme GreenTE (Green Tissue Engineering), a multidisciplinary consortium of 7 Dutch universities. Together, GreenTE will unravel how plants sense and respond to mechanical stimuli. These fundamental insights will be the basis to develop engineering interventions to improve plant regeneration, seed longevity and defenses against disease. Your task will be to further develop two-dimensional and three-dimensional models of plant development, incorporating mechanical feedback loops to regulate cellular decision making and polarization. The goal will be to unravel how plant shape and size is regulated by feedback loops between the tissue and organ levels and cellular and molecular levels. The project will further develop a two-dimensional open source package for modeling plant tissues, called VirtualLeaf, which coupled a Hamiltonian description of cell wall strains and stresses and turgor pressures with sets of ordinary differential equations describing the biochemical networks regulating cellular decision making. Models will be initiated with simulated data and 2D and 3D imaging data of plant tissues (the thale cress Arabidopsis and the aquatic fern Ceratopteris). At a later stage, the models can be extended to three dimensions using software developed concurrently by a postdoc in our team.
The successful applicant will be an integral member of the GreenTE community, which offers an open, diverse and inspiring environment to engage in multidisciplinary mechanobiology research at the intersection of biology, chemistry and physics, and is expected to participate in GreenTE events, training and collaborations.
For more information and to apply (deadline September 15th, 2026), see: https://careers.universiteitleiden.nl/job/PhD-position-in-modeling-the-mechanical-regulation-of-plant-development-and-regeneration-%281_0-FTE%29/16814-en_US/
